I'm beginning to really hate the bad guys who REALLY care about their families, thus we must like them cliche'. Its lame. Stop it already. But this film is seemingly completely oblivious to the concept of cliche because its so unrelentingly full of them. Its not a terrible movie, but damn this corrupt cop ground has been covered and if you're making me come back to it then something else about your film has to be unique in some way. This isn't because it does what's been done before to a thoroughly middling standard. Plus it slams the clutch down hard on the bad guy family thing. I'm pretty sure we see Colin Farrell holding the picture of his wife more then we actually see Colin Farrell's wife.
Amazingly, it has a sort of decent cast. The afore-mentioned Farrell is a good actor desperately seeking good films but seems somehow unable to find them (In Bruges notwithstanding). He gives it his best shot here, but its in vein as this kind of thing is done with much more intelligence and Quality on The Shield. Cool to see he's open to playing bad guys though. Its getting increasingly depressing to watch Edward Norton in films, as I really thought he was going to be one of this generation's best actors but since Fight Club he's pretty much made mediocre films without exception (with a couple of exceptions) and he needs another great film/performance very, very soon. His performance here is phoned in to the max, which is still much better then watching Jon Voight's senile turn as the family patriarch. Acting aside, this film pretty much criss-crosses bland obvious who dunnit with bland, obvious scenes of family melodrama. Congratulations to perpetual background actor Noah Emmerich on bagging such a high profile role, even if he has to say lines like ' Yeah! well my wife's dying of Cancer!' to win an argument.
If I were to use an adjective to describe this film, I'd most definately come down on 'unspectacular'.
Rating: 5/10
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